The same qualities of courage and swift decision were manifested on the occasion on which he won the Victoria Cross during the action of Vimy Ridge on the 9th of April, 1917. MacDowell delights in battle detail. He wants to know just where he is going when he enters an engagement, and before the big attack on Vimy he studied all the available Intelligence Reports and aeroplane maps, even selecting the particular German dug-out in which he intended to establish his headquarters after the position was won. The 38th, having been reorganized after the battle on the Somme, had moved up to the trenches at Vimy just after Christmas Day, 1916. For four long winter months the battalion remained in front of the famous ridge until, on that day in April, it went up, in conjunction with other Canadian units, in full battle array and snatched the position from the enemy. It is impossible to over-estimate the strategic value of Vimy Ridge. Its two spurs, flung out west and south-west in a series of heights which dominated the western plain, were regarded by military experts as the backbone of the whole German position in France. The Ridge was not only a naturally strong position made as impregnable as German skill could make it; it was more than that. Upon it, it was argued, hinged--and still hinges--the entire strategy of the enemy's retreat in the west. The enemy had held the heights since the third month of the war. They were the great bastion of his lines. Four times had the Allies attacked the position, biting deep into the German line; but still the enemy held the Ridge, though the holding of it had cost him sixty thousand men. It was to obtain possession of this famous series of hills that the Canadian battalions climbed out of their trenches at 5.30 a.m. on that April day. Few men slept soundly on the night before the great attack. The stern, hard training for the operation which had been in process for some weeks had tightened and toughened every link in the chain from the highest rank to the lowest, and the last few hours dragged fitfully. All watches had been synchronized and immediately 5.30 o'clock ticked a roar of artillery, awe-inspiring and stupendous, burst from the batteries, the hiding-places of which were only revealed by the short, sharp flashes; and Vimy Ridge was all afire with cataclysmic death and destruction.